A second season, a better start for the Cubs

I love the way the Florida State League baseball season divides neatly into halves. This recognizes the big differences between early season and late season.

MARK LANEFOOTNOTE

I love the way the Florida State League baseball season divides neatly into halves. This recognizes the big differences between early season and late season. You might wear a jacket on a night in April at the start of Season 1, but Season 2 is when Florida summer mutates into something altogether more hardcore. This also recognizes the nature of Minor League Baseball. There's been a lot of churn on the bench since spring. And in the process, the reboot of a team's win-loss record gives fresh hope for those fans who witnessed a rocky first-season start that took some time to reverse itself. So we now take our seats in the second weekend of Season 2 with a mix of bad news and good news. Bad news: Outfielder Jorge Soler is out of action, perhaps for the rest of the season, with a stress fracture in his left leg. He's now hobbling around the Cubs' training camp in Arizona in a walking boot. Normally, minor league players are anonymous. The exceptional ones breeze in and out of town before you're aware they've been here. The ones who develop more slowly are only recognizable as star material after they've gone. This means the local fan can only make the most doubtful of claims that they knew he had it in him all along. Yes, we did. Instead, as the Alabama song, "Cheap Seats" proclaims, "We got a great pitcher, what's his name. Well, we can't even spell it." Which actually is one of the cool things about minor league play. Everyone's a scout. Nobody comes to the game with a lot of preconceptions about the players. If you're not on the team bus, no player comes with a distinct personality. The focus is entirely on the field, game by game. And there's a kind of purity in that. But not this year. In an unusual development, this year's Cubs included not one but two bona fide, fans-can-spell-their-names players, Soler and Javier Baez. With Soler out of action, Baez is the team's undisputed home-run leader with 16 home runs, eight in June alone. And four of those were in a single game, something that happened only once before in the near-century of FSL play and only 115 times since 1889 in American professional baseball, according to the Society for American Baseball research. So yeah, that's spelled B-A-E-Z. The good news is that with a clean slate in the new second season, the team is playing well at home again and is in first place in the Florida State League North. A new and hopeful season with two months of play ahead. And despite the lack of midsummer dollar-beer nights on this schedule — none until August? Sheesh! — the summer feels still young and we're just settling into the afternoons when temperatures and humidity both hover in the high 80s and there will be fireworks over the center field fence on the Fourth of July. Second Season has always been my favorite. The other's just a warm-up.

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